Amazon's Plan to Create iPad Tablet Rival Reportedly Underway

Amazon's Android store, "Honeycomb"-friendly app and cloud-computing venture suggest a tablet is on its way. Now, a new report says Amazon has placed orders with an OEM.

E-reader leader Amazon.com is reportedly moving ahead with
plans to offer an iPad-battling, Android-running tablet.
According to a May 3 report from Taipei-based DigiTimes, Amazon expects sales of the
device to reach 700,000 to 800,000 units a month during the "peak
season," contributing approximately $3.5 billion to the coffers of
notebook manufacturer Quanta.

Quanta has received OEM orders from Amazon for a tablet that
will "receive full support from Taiwan-based electrophoretic display (EPD)
maker E Ink Holdings for supplying touch panel as well as providing its Fringe
Field Switching (FFS) technology," the site reported, citing sources from
"upstream component makers."

It added that Quanta is an OEM partner to Research In Motion for its PlayBook tablet, and
Sony, for its planned tablets-currently known officially as "S1"
and "S2" and less officially as the
wedge and the squashed burrito-and is angling to work with Lenovo on
its planned LePad.

Amazon has been gradually bringing together components that
some say could make it Apple's first real competitor. In addition to a sales platform
that helped its Kindle e-reader line enjoy gangbuster sales - over the
last holiday season, the Kindle even managed to knock the seventh Harry Potter
book from its best-selling-product-ever perch-Amazon has been working on
the ecosystem necessary for Apple-level success. In
March it launched the Amazon Appstore for Android-an app market to
rival Google's Android Market, where users can purchase applications through a
Web browser or via an application downloaded to an Android smartphone or
tablet.
In April, it also updated its Kindle
for Android app, optimizing it to run Android 3.0 or "Honeycomb,"
the version of the Google OS specifically designed for tablets.
And with the recent launch of its cloud-based
service, Cloud Drive, it flexed some serious cloud-computing muscle,
beating Apple and Google, among other competitors with tablets already planned
or launched, to a space that the market is undoubtedly headed in. Cloud Drive
lets customers store photos, videos and documents online, and to play music via
Amazon's "Cloud Player."
Forrester Research analyst
Sarah Rotman Epps has said her firm expects Apple to hold on to at least 80
percent of the U.S. consumer tablet market this year.

"It would be easy to call the game for Apple as the
second inning is starting, but we won't, because we see a market that's ripe
for disruption by Amazon in particular," Rotman Epps wrote in a March 10
blog post. "Amazon could create a compelling Android- or Linux-based
tablet offering easy access to Amazon's storefront (including its ... Android app store) and
unique Amazon features like one-click purchasing, Amazon Prime service, and its
recommendations engine."
Analyst Jack Gold, with J. Gold Associates, has agreed,
writing in a March research note that a "Kindle-Android
device could prove popular, building on the large installed base of Kindle
users."
Drawing on that base could prove particularly useful, as
consumer attention diverts from e-readers to tablets.
"Amazon's Kindle still has strong sales, but the e-book
reader is currently still unable to successfully cut into the markets outside
of North America and Europe," DigiTimes reported, again citing unnamed
sources. "Therefore, Amazon internally plans to reduce Kindle's market
price to attract consumer demand from the education and consumer market, while
... using its advantage in software and content resources to challenge
iPad2."

Michelle Maisto has been covering the enterprise mobility space for a decade, beginning with Knowledge Management, Field Force Automation and eCRM, and most recently as the editor-in-chief of Mobile Enterprise magazine. She earned an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and in her spare time obsesses about food. Her first book, The Gastronomy of Marriage, if forthcoming from Random House in September 2009.